On Thursday 29 June ARTES celebrated the winners of its annual scholarships and of the Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize with a ceremony held at the Wallace Collection in London. The Collection’s director Xavier Bray and Carmen Brieva Rodriguez from the Cultural Office of the Spanish Embassy joined the celebration.
ARTES started offering travel and PhD scholarships three years ago, with the aim to support and nurture young scholars in the field of Iberian and Latin American studies. The prizes are sponsored by Coll y Cortés and were awarded to the following researchers:
Travel Scholarships:
- Ana Dias, a PhD candidate at the University of Durham, working on ‘The Apocalypse in early medieval Iberia: the function and impact of the illuminated ‘Beatus’ manuscripts.’ Ana will use her prize to conduct crucial fieldwork in three libraries in Spain, where she will examine three manuscripts of Beatus’ work to analyse at first hand their codicology, illumination and palette.
- Maria Teresa Chicote Pompanin, a PhD candidate at the Warburg Institute, who will make three trips to Spain to examine archives, buildings and objects in connection with her research project, titled ‘Patronage, Fame and Memory in Late-Medieval Castile: Juan and Diego Pacheco, Marquises of Villena (1445 – 1529).’
PhD Scholarship for PhD students at working on Hispanic visual culture before 1800 at a UK University:
- Maeve O’Donnell, for her PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art: ‘The Castilian Altar in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: A social and material history.’ Maeve’s thesis approaches the medieval altar as an assemblage of artworks with individual and cumulative religious, social and material significance. By donating or producing the different furnishings of the altar, craftsmen, merchants, bishops, and monarchs established personal links to this sacred space. In addition, objects displayed on the altar in medieval Castile functioned as barometers of political and economic shifts in this dynamic kingdom. Her analysis of Castilian altarpieces, frontals, figurative sculptures, liturgical objects, reliquaries and textiles unearths works of art that have not been studied before while offering an innovative approach to the medieval altar.
Scholarship for PhD students or post-doctoral researchers based in Spain, Portugal or Latin America who wish to conduct research in the UK:
- Ignacio J. López Hernández, who is working on a dissertation about Architecture and Military Buildings in the Spanish Caribbean under the supervision of Dr Alfredo Morales at the University of Seville.
This year the Scholarship Committee was able to make two additional awards:
- Francisco de Asís García García, for his travel to the UK to study reports and files held at the V&A’s Archive related to Medieval and Early Modern textile acquisitions from Spain (or of possible Spanish origin) and the iconographical analysis of selected pieces. This work is a joint collaborative study with the Marie S.-Curie project “Interwoven” (no. 703711) led by Dr Ana Cabrera Lafuente at the V&A.
- Sylvia Alvares-Correa, a PhD candidate at Oxford, whose research considers the Flemish artworks associated with Rainha Dona Leonor of Portugal (1458-1525), including Quentin Metsys’s The Seven Sorrows of the Virgin; Goswyn van der Weyden’s Presentation at the Temple; a number of manuscripts, and the anonymous Passion of Christ in Jerusalem panorama, amongst others. By investigating the historiography, materiality, and iconography of these works and their place within the ambit of Dona Leonor’s piety and patronage, this project will contribute to the broader understanding of patterns of patronage in early modern Europe, artistic exchange between Flanders and Iberia, and the devotional climate of Renaissance Portugal.
The winner of the 2017 Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize was also announced. This prize was set up 5 years ago with the generous support of the Office for Scientific and Cultural Affairs of the Embassy of Spain in London, and includes a cash prize and a specially designed bronze medal. Like the scholarships, the essay prize is intended to encourage promising scholars in the study of Spanish visual culture (from any period) and is open to students at UK universities at any level of study.
This year’s winner was David Cambronero, a MA student at the Courtauld Institute of Art, who gave a short presentation based on his essay on lighting in the Great Mosque of Córdoba in the caliphal period.
ARTES 